The PBE has been updated! As we continue the 8.16 PBE cycle, today's patch includes more Nexus Blitz testing, as well as tentative balance changes on a handful of Tank champions!

Continue reading for more information!

(Warning: PBE Content is tentative and subject to change - what you see below may not reflect what eventually gets pushed to live servers at the end of the cycle! Manage your expectations accordingly.)

Table of Contents

Continued Nexus Blitz Testing

Today we have a ton of event bug fixes and tunings, the most notable being we're changing the placement of battle royale and King of the Hill circles to avoid spawning centered on an enemy tower :3

Nerfing DFG and FoN's gold efficiency to be more in line with their modern competitors.

Trying some tower changes that make games less snowbally:
A. We are greatly reducing the local and global gold that towers give. Overall, we feel that the map control afforded by simply downing a tower in NB is powerful enough without also giving the team that takes it 3 kills worth of gold.
B. We're buffing tower scaling AD. Should make tower dives more dangerous as the game progresses.

In future patches we'll be looking into some more champ specific balance passes, trying to add another item or two, and maybe even get in another event or reward before 8.16. Also bug fixes, lots of bug fixes.

Keep the feedback coming friends! Thank you.

Performance
Fixed some major hitches and lag that have been plaguing the PBE environment for the last 2 days (these were not Nexus Blitz specific)

Jungle

Red and Blue distribution:: 2 closest champions (regardless of who on the team last hit) >>> Last hitter and the closest champion who is not the last hitter

Figured it would be useful to start a series of posts that give greater context on the changes we make to Nexus Blitz as we get closer to the live Alpha. This is the first. Let's talk about the jungle.

Nexus Blitz Jungle
We want the jungle in Nexus Blitz to be easier/more learnable than on SR (and perhaps a good place to practice basic mechanics before trying the role on the bigger map). Since NB only has 2 roles (Lane and Jungle) it's very likely that everyone will be end up jungling at some point. Hopefully, we can preserve a number of the parts of jungling that SR junglers enjoy while expanding the appeal of the role to non-junglers as well. We also like duo jungling quite a bit and are hoping that it feels fresh and exciting to play with a friend (who might be better or worse than you). We're trying to remove as many barriers to that experience as possible.

To that end, the Nexus Blitz jungle is being tuned to allow numerous champion combos to function. The primary challenge when clearing isn't health cost, but time. Camps don't hurt all that much, especially after the first clear, and mainly just take a while to kill. We'll also be looking at the starting jungle items and enchantments as needed to ensure that a wide range of classes can fit into the role. Duo jungle helps here because you can pick pairs that compensate for each other's weaknesses.

So far we've seen tanks, fighters, mages, and even some marksman and support pairs have success. Fingers crossed we can keep a hold of that diversity once Nexus Blitz's four-week live alpha begins and a meta shakes out. At the end of the day we don't expect EVERY champion to jungle in NB, but we do hope we can get a wider range of picks, supporting tons of potential pairings.

Do you have any thoughts on NB jungle? Things you like? Ways to improve it? Please keep the feedback coming.

-August-
-Nexus Blitz team-"

Balance Changes

* NOTE*: The PBE is a testing grounds for new, tentative, & experimental changes. Be aware that what you see below may be relative to other changes earlier this cycle! These are not official notes.

Fizz : Overshot the buffs a bit. Likely to push out a small hotfix to him on Monday pulling a bit from ratios and maybe a small amount from base damage on W

Akali: Mastery curve over games played looks appropriate, but we're going to evaluate her on Monday and consider whether we need to give her some training wheels as players get over the first 10-20 games. Nothing planned as of yet, but we'll know Monday after a weekend of games played"

"I touched on it on another post, but we're doing some short term work to siphon out some damage from runes. One of the directions we're currently testing with Electrocute is decreasing both the damage and the cd (get the proc more frequently, but with reduced payout). We're not going quite to TL levels, but that's a rough model we're shooting for.
Just going to go ahead and drop the current list in here for you guys to discuss. This will also be on the PBE tomorrow.

Notably, there's some runes like Aery and Comet not included in this list which are cited pretty frequently, they likely also need more work in terms of gameplay that isn't just simply some number shifts (we're still talking about them though)"

Putting this out to get some feedback on our current planned tanks changes. The general direction we chose was to find ways to scale each of their defensives in ways that were unique to their kits which hopefully nets some satisfaction while also generally being power up. Worth calling out that Tahm Kench got a bit of a different treatment than some of the other champs on this list.

Nautilus:
Goal: Give Nautilus' shield some more flexibility; aiming to bring the effect into more usable trade windows and additional casts per jungle camp.

Rammus:
Goal: Generally just trying to make him a bit tankier at all stages of the game, but still with a heavier skew towards physical ad rather than magic damage.

Defensive Ball Curl (W)

Bonus Armor :: 50/60/70/80/90% >>> 60/70/80/90/100%

Bonus Magic Resist :: 25/30/35/40/45% >>> 30/35/40/45/50%

Sion
Goal: Increase the reward for stacking W passive

Soul Furnace (W)

Permanent max HP gain from small enemies :: 3 >>> 4

Permanent max HP gain from large enemies :: 10 >>> 15

Leona:
Goal: Giving Leona the potential for much higher uptime on her defense button, but trying to do so in a way that doesn't buff her lane too much. As such, W and E have had their damage redistributed to mean Leona doesn't get both incredible offense and incredible defense if she maxes W first.

Eclipse (W)

Damage :: 60/100/140/180/220 >>> 60/90/120/150/180

Cooldown :: 14 >>> 18/16/14/12/10

Armor :: 25/35/45/55/65 (+20%) >>> 15/20/25/30/35 (+40%)

Magic Resist :: 20/30/40/50/60 (+20%) >>> 15/20/25/30/35 (+40%)

Zenith Blade (E)

* Damage :: 60/100/140/180/220 >>> 60/110/160/210/260

Maokai
Goal: Giving Maokai some stat help aimed at a moderate buff to jungle position and small buff to non jungle positions. We're particularly hesitant to over buff his top lane.

Base Stats:

Movespeed :: 335 >>> 340

Magic Resist Growth :: 1.25 >>> 1.75

Sapling Toss (E)

Max damage against non champions :: 300 >>> 500

Tahm Kench
Goal: Reduce the overall availability of his defensive devour and better reward use in aggressive scenarios. Also tuning Q to give him a few more buttons to press in light of longer cd ally W, and reducing the slow to compensate.